


Hatchets, Landmines, and Coffins

by BleedingTypewriter



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Cemetery, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Light Angst, M/M, Talking, dealing with FEELINGS
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-18
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:35:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24245881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingTypewriter/pseuds/BleedingTypewriter
Summary: Over the years, Keith brings five important people to his father's grave.
Relationships: Keith/Lance (Voltron)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 51





	Hatchets, Landmines, and Coffins

Keith visits his father’s grave six times.

The first is for the funeral, and it’s a staggering number of new faces: friends and fellow firefighters his father had never introduced him to. Most seem surprised to see another generation of Kogane. That had stung, at the time. (It still stings. He understands, in retrospect, the need to keep a half-alien son as sequestered as possible, but his understanding doesn’t make it hurt any less.)

It had been overwhelming. More than. He’d stood quiet and stoic, shoulder held stiff and captive under the hand of a man he hadn’t known offering comfort he hadn’t wanted.

It had all just been so _cold_.

He’d been burning up since he’d gotten news of the fire; had felt consumed by the same flames that he’d learned had killed his father. It had been days before the ‘how _could_ he’ had burnt down into embers; had settled into smouldering guilt and sadness and horror. It had been a low heat, cooking him from the inside, until the meat of him had felt tough and charred.

The day of his father’s funeral, though, Keith’d been cold. The house he’d been staying in was cold (a horrible adjustment after so long in the desert’s heat), and the October air had been cold, and the firefighters, casket, headstone…all of it had been cold, stiff, _dead_ (like his father, he’d thought at the time, and laughed inappropriately right in the middle of the eulogy).

Watching the coffin sink into the earth of the graveyard, straps elongating like macabre fingers, Keith had felt an icy, unshakeable hatred for the place. He’s not great with promises, but he keeps the one he makes to himself to not come back to the cemetary for nearly ten years.

(He ends up breaking it in the end, though, anyway, and that fact is not lost on him.)

The second time he visits is with Shiro. He doesn’t want to bring him there—not really. Or rather, he does, but it feels important in a way he’s not quite sure he’s ready to face.

“You don’t have to do this,” Shiro says with a hand on his shoulder, for perhaps the thrid time since they reached the cemetary. “We can wait until you’re ready.”

And the thing is, Shiro has already taught him so much about patience and readiness, but this is something he doesn’t think he’ll ever be _ready_ for. He hates it already—hates the lush grass and the careful rows of stone all bearing down on so much death—but if Shiro is serious about his promise to never give up on Keith, he figures the guy is entitled to see what he’s in for.

So Keith doesn’t answer; just leads Shiro along until they’re at his father’s headstone. They go up the wrong row at first. He’s not sure whether to be embarrassed or not that he doesn’t know exactly where it is; has to scan the chiseled names to find it.

There are fresh-ish flowers on the ground. One of his firefighter colleagues, most likely. It looks mostly the way he’s tried not to remember it: pretty in its plainness, ‘Kogane’ carved in a generic font, a little worn but still well-kept. And cold, cold, _cold_.

“There he is,” Keith says. (It’s cold, cold, _cold_ , too.)

Shiro stays respectfully silent for a long time. He clasps his hands in front of him, and Keith wonders if he’s religious, or if this is a soldier thing. They’ve never talked about it.

“What was he like?” Shiro asks finally.

Keith shrugs. “He was nice.”

Shiro puts his hand on his shoulder again. “Nice?” he prompts. The younger man is reminded of that man at the funeral. Shiro’s hand is heavier.

Keith shrugs it off. “Yeah. Nice. He was…kind.”

“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”

Keith bites the inside of his cheek. “I’ll never want to talk about it. But I…”

He takes a deep breath and realizes that’s a little shaky, and he _hates_ it, so he slumps down in the grass, back against the headstone just because he knows it’s disrespectful. As usual, though, Shiro shows that he has less regard for the rules than he likes to let on (or, maybe, just more regard for Keith) and sits beside him, elbows resting on his bent knees. The ground is a little wet; it must be as uncomfortable for Shiro as it is for Keith, soaking a damp spot into his pants, but if it bothers him he doesn’t show it.

For his part, Keith rips up fistfuls of grass from between his legs and tosses them idly into the wind, watching them scatter over the next grave (a flat, inlaid stone engraved with two dates spanning double Keith’s dad’s). “He was like you,” he says. He almost startles himself. He hadn’t meant to speak, but Shiro has this way of exuding just the right amount of patience, like he can impress with sheer will his desire to help. It’s almost annoying sometimes.

Like now. Shiro doesn’t answer, just _looks_ at him like it’s okay if he elaborates and okay if he doesn’t. Keith rips up two more handfuls of grass and scatters them (and Shiro doesn’t so much as look vaguely disappointed in his blatant show of disregard for the grounds) before he sighs and lets himself take up a little more space.

“He was easygoing, but he could be stern, sometimes. If I put myself in too much danger. If I…asked too many questions.” There’s a bald spot in the grass now, a scab of wet earth, and he digs at the edge of a stone peeking through. “He didn’t like to talk about…her. He promised he’d tell me when I was ready, that it was for my own good not to ask, but…I don’t know, he used to tell me I was like her, the type to push every big red button I could find that says, ‘Do not push.’”

“It sounds like he cared about you a lot.”

Keith snorts. “To a point.”

Shiro does that thing again, where he drains all the awkwardness out of the silence. He puts a hand on Keith’s shoulder, and squeezes once, and lets go, and Keith talks even though he doesn’t really want to.

“He had one kid. No wife, no family. Just one kid in the middle of nowhere and he decided to spend his days running into burning buildings.” He finally wriggles the stone free, and uses it to dig more viciously at the dirt. “Did you know it took three days before I found out what happened? No one knew he had a son to inform. Aside from my birth certificate, there was no record of me even existing. No medical records, dental, nothing. He never even took me to a doctor. He risked his life for people he didn’t even know, and he never took his son to a doctor.”

The stone is cold. He has to hold it between his thumb and forefinger to keep a solid grip, and it’s not long before, between the temperature and the awkward grip, they go numb. But he keeps digging, even as they cramp; even as the tips go pink and then red and then white. He waits for ‘I’m sure he had his reasons’ or ‘maybe you’ll understand someday,’ but Shiro offers neither. He sits quietly for a long time, and then says with almost no inflection whatsoever, “I think, sometimes, it might be impossible to explain…when you have to do what you can. When you can’t _not_ do what you have to do…”

It’s not comforting, but Keith’s not sure Shiro means it to be. There’s a certain hesitance in it; a lack of intonation that belies a vulnerability Keith isn’t sure he’s ever seen. It scares him a little. It’s honest, too, like Shiro is always honest, and that scares him even more.

He almost wishes for ‘I’m sure he had his reasons.’ This is unfamiliar territory.

“How come he didn’t do what he could _for me_?”

The familiar: ‘I’m sure he thought he was,’ or ‘He did what he thought was best.’

Shiro: “I don’t know.”

Keith shifts. The grass’s moisture has soaked right through his jeans and underwear, and it itches. There’s a little pit between his feet, now, where he’s been callously digging, and Shiro’s still paying it no mind. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

Shiro doesn’t even look at him. “Am I supposed to have an explanation?”

The stone finally falls from Keith’s numb fingers. “ _No_ ,” he says, strangely insistent, and it pisses him off. “But…”

He huffs; kicks at the stone with one muddy-toed sneaker; thinks sullenly that it’s no one’s business, not even Shiro’s, how he falls apart.

“I think it’s alright to be confused,” Shiro says. “It’s okay to not understand, sometimes.”

His father’s gravestone is rough against the back of Keith’s head. He can feel the indent of a letter—an N, maybe. “Okay for who?” he mutters, because it doesn’t _feel_ okay, and he’s not going through any of this for anyone else’s benefit.

Shiro just hums at that. It’s a short, calm sound, but his eyebrows pull down as he looks ahead into some unknown middle distance.

Sometimes it bothers Keith how much Shiro reminds him of his dad, but other times, like now, a difference will pop up so distinct that it makes Keith even more uncomfortable. There’s an anger underlying Shiro’s pinched expression that Keith’d never seen in his father. Sometimes he wonders if Shiro’s propensity for saving lives is a compulsion; if his own determined heroism frustrates him because he _can’t stop it_. Maybe he’d like to be selfish, just once—or maybe selfish about making yet another selfless decision. His dad had always been guilty about that, but never angry. It makes him feel closer to Shiro, that anger; even closer than he’d felt to his dad (but _that_ makes him feel guilty, which makes him feel closer to his father again, which makes him feel angry…).

But maybe that’s not it. Maybe Shiro’s just pissed that Keith is, for the umpteenth time, arguing with offered comfort. It seems unlikely, but sometimes Keith remembers that he doesn’t understand men like his father,.

But then, Shiro’d said it was okay to not understand.

But then. Okay for who?

Keith abandons the rock; digs into the earth with his bare, numb fingers. This is why he likes things like open highways and endless desert and hellos that come with guaranteed goodbyes. He can’t stand going in all these circles, and it feels like he’s been doing it for years, now.

Finally, Shiro slips one of his hands through the gap between Keith’s thigh and stomach, and rests it on the two dirty ones the younger man has jammed into the ground. It’s warm, but that might just be in comparison to the cold of the soil clinging to Keith’s fingers. It occurs to Keith that he can’t remember his father’s hands. He doesn’t know if Shiro’s are bigger; if their callouses would have been in the same places; if there was a dark grimy line beneath each of his dad’s fingernails like there is on Shiro’s. ‘Don’t stop me now,’ he thinks, and finishes aloud with a wry laugh, “I need a place for my hatchets.”

“What do you–?”

Keith uses his best approximation of his dad’s southern twang. “Some things you gotta bury, son. Hatchets, landmines, and coffins.” 

He laughs again. It’s not funny. Most people tell him so when he laughs inappropriately like this, but Shiro doesn’t. He just lifts his big, warm hand and digs into the soil alongside Keith’s and brings up a handful of dirt before pulling back into his own space.

It’s weird. Keith has never felt bigger than him before. He’s not even positive he does now...he feels _something_ er, anyway, and that’s weird enough. Shiro is always ____-er than everyone, including Keith, and it makes the boy finally feel like less of a monster because, for maybe the first time in his life, Shiro’s superiority doesn’t piss him off. Now, rubbing his hands together so the wet earth grinds into his palms and peppers the ground with wet, misshapen blobs, Shiro seems lost in a way Keith can identify with, and that’s more than a little terrifying.

Takashi Shirogane—Shiro—his _broth–_ ( _no_ , that feels like too much, still)...Shiro is never lost. “Something your dad used to say?” he asks, and his voice is smooth in a way that sounds like he’s trying—social worker smooth. _Green_ social worker smooth.

Snapping back is an instinct. “What do you think?”

Shiro parts his hands. The dirt has settled in the fine lines of his palms, so they’re a spider web of black-on-grey with smears of brown. There’s a wide blade of grass stuck between his left middle and ring finger. Keith wonders if it itches. “Sorry,” Shiro says. “Dumb question.”

Guilt settles in Keith’s stomach (a little of his father, again). “It...wasn’t, really. I didn’t mean...”

They sit like that for a while, side-by-side, dirty hands hung between their knees, looking out over rows of concrete rectangles that used to be people. The feeling starts coming back to Keith’s fingers. His thumb stings. He must have grazed it in his digging.

“When he sacrificed himself in that building,” Keith wonders aloud, “Do you think he knew how much he was asking _me_ to sacrifice, too?” He hangs his head. “Sorry, that’s a selfish thing to say.”

“It’s not. He did.”

The surety in Shiro’s tone tugs Keith’s eyes back to his face. He _looks_ sure, too, but not a whole lot else, like he’s stating a fact he has no opinion on.

“But he went in anyway,” Keith says.

“He did.”

Keith picks at the dirt under his fingernails, but it just leaves more behind. “He saved someone,” he says.

“...he did?”

“Yeah.” His pants dampen from butt to ankle as he stretches his legs flat against the ground. “Some teen. She keeps in contact with the fire station, and they try to send me cards, sometimes. She’s married, now. Has a kid on the way. Or maybe she has it now, I can’t remember when I heard that.”

That’s a lie. Keith knows. He’d put a vase through his foster parents’ TV when he got that card. He’d already been less-than-impressed that they’d tracked him down again—like a cold corpse is any good reason to stay in touch—but seeing the photo they’d included of two smiling faces and a round belly...the supplementary letter with its _thank you_ s and _I’m sorry_ s in loopy, carefree handwriting...the _Hope Your Well Kiddo_ scrawled in messy block letters from his dead father’s old fire chief on a cheap drugstore card…

His foster parents had looked terrified when Keith had finally been taken away, red-faced and exhausted. They’d been okay guardians, all things considered, but in those last moments they’d stood in the wreckage of their living room and looked at him like he was an alien. He’d asked Wanda, his social worker, to get them to send over what meager possessions he’d had in his room there, but he’d never received anything at the group home, and the next time he’d asked he’d been pointedly informed that the couple no longer wished to be involved in any way with the foster care system. (“Neither do I,” Keith had snorted, which really hadn’t helped his case.)

The kid from the card must be a couple years old by now. It must talk; must be _just_ starting to get curious about the world around it. (Heh, good luck with that.)

(... _good luck_.)

“I used to hate that. He died, she lived. Her kid has two parents, I have none. What the _hell_ …”

“Keith–”

“Now I just hope they end up okay.” Shiro is looking at him now, surprised. The indent of that N scrapes at Keith’s scalp as he tilts his head back again. “It’s not their fault my dad chose their future over his or mine. It’d be a total loss if they waste it and end up like m–”

“ _Keith_.”

“I know, I know, ‘don’t talk like you’re a lost cause,’ Wanda gets on me about that–”

“You’re going to understand one day.”

It’s a sentiment Keith has heard often, but never like this: shocked and resigned and a bit scared. There’s an honesty in it he hasn’t heard before. “What?”

“You have what it takes.”

“Wha–to understand?”

“To become someone who _can_ understand.”

“Someone who–?”

“I’m _sorry_ , Keith.”

Keith doesn’t get it. He won’t get it for a long time. It won’t be until years have passed, until he’s become a soldier and a friend, until he’s barrelling full-speed at a galran cruiser barrier with no illusions of survival that he’ll look back and understand Shiro’s pride and terror. He'd known what Keith’s potential would entail. He’d recognized the capacity for the exact same kind of self-sacrifice that had taken Keith's father and was threatening to take Shiro, too (though no one outside Shiro himself and the Garrison brass had known about that yet).

Now, though, Keith is young and volatile and simultaneously too old and too young for his age. There's something important in the way Shiro is talking to him, but he doesn't know what it is; doesn't know how to fit it in with the words he's saying and see the whole picture. Like everything else where his father has been concerned, he feels like he's looking through an optometrist's phoropter; like everything is just a little blurry, but it wouldn't be if they'd just click through a few more lenses (or, better yet, lift the whole thing up altogether and let him see for himself).

"I don't–why are you sorry?"

"I guess," Shiro scrubs a hand through that tuft at the front of his hair. Keith wonders if he's forgotten about the dirt on his hands, or if he just doesn't care. He leaves behind two dark, stiff streaks and a patch of black dandruff. "I guess I'm sorry that it has to hurt so much."

Keith considers asking _what_ has to hurt so much, but he already has his own answer to that— _all of it does_ —so he says instead, "That's not _your_ fault."

Shiro does that thing where he looks taken aback and fond at the same time, and it manages to soften the edges of a concern that irritates Keith when it comes from other adults. "I'm still sorry," he says. "There's a lot you shouldn't have to deal with."

Keith snorts. "Says _you_."

He means it to brighten the mood, but Shiro doesn't smile. "Exactly. I'm an authority on the matter," he responds, and there's a lilt to his voice that's trying for light-hearted and falling somewhere around resigned.

For the first time, Keith wonders if Shiro knows why he’s done any of the stupid, amazing things he's done (that, really, are only heroic in hindsight because he hadn't ended up gunned down by some nobody or smeared on the side of an enemy aircraft). He's given his reasons: because it was the right thing to do, because people had been in danger, because it had needed to be done. But now, looking at the tense clench in the great war hero Takashi Shirogane's jaw—at the desperate, guilty comraderie on his closest friend's face—Keith wonders if he knows why _he_ had done any of it.

He wonders if this is another thing that should remind him of his father.

"It's okay to not understand sometimes," Keith mutters, and even though he hadn't been going for levity, Shiro laughs this time.

"Touché," he says.

A question occurs to Keith. He opens his mouth; lets it hang that way. It might be a rude thing to ask, but he's not really all that concerned about that kind of thing with Shiro, these days. He knows any reprimand would be good-natured. He's just not sure if he should ask because he's always kind of liked that Shiro doesn't give him answers, but rather trusts him to find them himself (in his own way, when possible, and in Shiro's way where Keith's is still too bombastic). But this time he gets the feeling Shiro will have an answer all ready, and Keith’s not sure it’s one he wants to hear.

He’s still not sure how much of his father is in all this. 

All the same, he ventures: "How do you leave when you know it could be for the last time?"

And Shiro looks for all the world like he’s disinfecting a wound, grimacing at the necessary sting he has to inflict when everything’s already throbbing and raw. “How could I stay, knowing I could make a difference if I left?”

Two smiling faces and a round belly flash through Keith’s head, alongside a series of strange, borrowed beds in strange, borrowed houses (filled with strange, borrowed families that had never been his). “What if staying would make a bigger difference?”

“Sometimes differences aren’t bigger or smaller. They’re just closer or further away. They’re just...needed.”

“Needed, huh?” Keith looks down at the hole between his legs; at its jagged edges and uneven centre, stones jutting up at odd angles. He gestures absently with his chin toward the earth, where six feet below his dad is staring up at him with a perpetual skeleton’s grin. “People needed him. But what if I did, too?”

“Keith–”

“I used to think I didn’t, but…” Keith looks back at Shiro and tries to pick out all the differences between that face and what he can remember of his father’s. There are a lot of them, but none that outweigh the obvious, non-physical similarities. “Now I’m not sure. Now I think maybe I needed him a lot. But...he didn’t think so.”

“I–”

“Or if he did, he thought I could handle it. Or that someone else would need him even more. Which...I guess they did. Maybe it’s a compliment. Like a right of passage.” He puts on that twang again. “Now you’re a man, son, that’s all for me in this life.”

He can see Shiro wanting to argue. He’s good at telling when he’s pushed the buttons adults hadn’t even realized were there, though it’s a rare thing with the older man beside him. Shiro’s buttons are usually obvious and protected. Not this one, though. This one must’ve been inlaid and smooth, and running deep beneath the skin. “That’s not...Keith, that’s not…”

“It _is_ , though. And maybe everything would be easier if we could all just be okay with the fact that it _is_...it’s... _it’s_ …”

He doesn’t have words for what it is. Neither does Shiro, he’s pretty sure. It’s somewhere between unfair and unavoidable; between unfathomable and unescapeable. But it’s the one part of all this he understands: the fundamental way it has to _suck_.

 _Why_ it sucks is still a mystery, but _that_ it does is stark and clear.

Maybe that has to be enough for now.

“I have to tell you something,” Shiro says, and he sounds like he really does _have to_ ; the resignation about him is thick and sour. “This is probably the wrong time to do it.”

Keith shrugs. It might be. But then, maybe that’s for the best. Nothing about this place has ever (or will ever, he suspects) feel right, anyway. “I mean, while we’re already at it…”

Shiro chuckles drily. “Fair enough, as usual.”

He’s quiet for a long time, then; quiet for so long that Keith starts to wonder if he’s changed his mind about whatever he’d been about to share. Keith feels oddly bitter about that—he’s suddenly very aware of how tired he is of self-sacrificing mentors being cagey with him. Even in his own head that sounds harsh, and maybe it is.

But right now, straddling a pit he’s dug six feet above his father’s dead body, shoulder-to-shoulder with a man so detrimentally determined to _help_ , Keith isn’t concerned with harshness. He just wants Shiro to be more honest with him than the man they’re sitting on had been, even if it hurts.

Finally, Shiro shifts against the headstone; deflates against it a little, spine curving so his chest sinks down toward his hips. When he talks, it’s into the space between his dirty hands. “There’s a mission coming up,” he says. “It’s called ‘Kerberos’...”

Ten minutes later, Keith wants to take it back. Only he doesn’t. Not really. He’s glad Shiro told him. It gives him a chance to make up his mind: Shiro is leaving, but Keith will _not_ be left alone again.

He will _not_ be informed belatedly about a loss no one had known he’d be around to feel.

He will _not_ , in five years, get a cheap card from Adam with an update on some new boyfriend.

He stares at Shiro, who stares at the wet grass over the grave between his feet.

He will _not_ lose like this again.


End file.
